Adoptionism

Adoptionism is the doctrine according to which Jesus was a human being, elevated to divine status by God's design through his adoption, either when he was conceived, or at some point in time. of his life, or after his death.

Precedents of Christian adoptionism

There were at least two more or less similar conceptions (not necessarily mutually exclusive) from which this idea may emanate:

• In Jewish thinking, the messiah is a human being chosen by God to carry out his spectacular work: to take the Hebrews (a people so far frequently subjected by more powerful others), to rescue them from oppression and to bring the Kingdom of Heaven to earth by bringing peace and prosperity. In this sense, the messiah is not the Son of God as Christianity considers it.

• In Greek tradition there were heroes elevated to divine condition after extraordinary deeds or feats, through apotheosis. The most important example of this is Heracles, who after being burned in a pineapple is taken by his father Zeus to govern at his side. Due to the predominance of the Roman Empire, whose cultural orientation was predominantly Greek, at the time of early Christians it is highly likely that this example would be within its reach, in the way of a popular history.

At the same time, adoptionism was psychologically interesting to the early Christians, and it was easy to identify with a hero like Jesus, a human being like anyone else who is chosen ("adopted") by God and thus gave hope of salvation to the Christians themselves, as humble before God as his greatest hero.

Early Adopters

One of the most famous adoptionists was Theodotus the Tanner, an inhabitant of Byzantium who took the preaching of this doctrine to Rome in the year 190.

Over time, as Christianity took hold in the upper layers of the Roman Empire, incarnationism was imposed as a doctrine, according to which Jesus had always been the Son of God (specifically the Second Person of God). Throughout the so-called Christological disputes, adoptionism would be revived, in a more refined version, by Paul of Samosata (in the III< century) and by his disciple Arius. Bishop Photinus of Sirmium, deposed in 351 by the Synod of Sirmium, was also an adoptionist.

Arianism, in effect, would become the most harassing heresy that the young Church would have to face in its early years. Finally, after the doctrinal formulations of the Councils of Nicea (325) and Constantinople I (381), adoptionism was finally abandoned.

High Middle Ages

At the end of the 8th century, Elipando de Toledo, Archbishop of Toledo, then under the rule of the Emirate of Córdoba, defended adoptionism. Elipando did not deny the dogma of the Holy Trinity, that is, he believed that the Son was eternal like the Father and that together with the Holy Spirit they formed a single God. The problem for Elipando was that the Son had been generated by a woman, so he could not have a divine "nature", but only a human one. So the only possible alternative was that the Father had adopted him as his own Son. His reasoning was linked to the Christological reflections of authors from the Visigothic era such as Julián de Toledo.

Elipando was archbishop of Toledo, which at that time was subject to the emirs of Córdoba. But despite this, the prestige of the Toledo headquarters was still maintained throughout the Iberian Peninsula, so his "adoptionist" proposal provoked a harsh response in the Kingdom of Asturias led by the monk Beato de Liébana, possibly abbot of a monastery. and very well related to Queen Adosinda. Beato de Liébana accused Elipando of madness, heresy and ignorance and came to call him "testicle of the Antichrist". According to Eduardo Manzano Moreno, the controversy between Elipando and Beato de Liébana was "spurred on by the strong struggle between a northern church, increasingly independent, and the old Visigothic church, whose main episcopates had fallen into Andalusian territory".

A similar position is the one held by Luis A. García Moreno: «the arrival in Asturias of this news [about the acceptance of adoptionism by the archbishop of Toledo] presented a magnificent opportunity to try to separate and distinguish the Church from small kingdom of the subject to Islam, which at the same time also meant its approach to the Christian West of that time, embodied in the kingdom of Charlemagne. In this way, an obscure monk from Liébana, Beato, helped by the bishop of Osma, Eterio, a refugee in Asturias, began a radical dialectical attack against the adoptionist theses defended by Elipando».

The conflict worsened when Bishop Felix of Urgell sided with Elipando. As Urgell had just been subjected to the Carolingian Empire, the adoptionist complaint reached the court of Charlemagne, and a series of eminent clergymen —such as Alcuin of York, Paulinus of Aquileia or Theodulf of Orleans—, with the support of the king himself and the pope, they occupied themselves in refuting the "heresy" of Archbishop Elipando de Toledo and Bishop Félix de Urgel.

A council was held in Frankfurt in 794, chaired by Charlemagne himself, in which adoptionism was condemned. In one of its canons it was said that this "heresy should be radically extirpated from the Holy Church." Finally Felix de Urgell was removed from his diocese and confined to Lyons, where he spent the rest of his days.

Elipando died around the year 805 in the Toledo headquarters without any disciple continuing his “adoptionist” thesis. As Eduardo Manzano Moreno has highlighted, "the death of the link with the heirs of the old Visigothic church was thus certified, which remained confined to a territory, the Andalusian, progressively marginalized from the political tendencies that helped shape Western Christianity".

For his part, García Moreno has stressed that «this affirmation of the dogmatic independence —and even superiority— of the Asturian Church over that of Toledo, curiously coincides in time with the first mention of the evangelization of the Peninsula by Santiago el Mayor in Beato's Commentaries on the Apocalypse, and above all with the surprising invocation of Jacobean patronage over Hispania in a liturgical hymn dedicated to Mauregato by Beato de Liébana himself, in the opinion of Sánchez Albornoz».

Adoptionism was condemned at the Second Ecumenical Council of Nicaea (in 787). In the years 794 and 799, Popes Hadrian I and Leo III condemned adoptionism as heresy at the synods of Frankfurt and Rome, respectively.